Because let’s say you’re Tom Hanks. And you get TomHanks@Lemmy.World

Well, what’s stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?

And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it’s him. But it’s actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.

Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.

  • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    You’re arguing quantity over quality. I do not care the least for bootstrapped growth at the detriment of the platform. I also do not care about people who idolize and platform hop in order to follow celebrities. I suspect very few will bring with them value beyond increased traffic.

    If you want this, Reddit is still an option available to you.

    • rglullisA
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      2 months ago

      Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.

      I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.

      (Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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        2 months ago

        Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case

        It’s more against having celebrities and their followers coming here en masse, which I get.

        I’ve still seen a few comments mentioning “organic grow” which seems indeed healthier

        • rglullisA
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          2 months ago

          “oh, I want it to grow, I just don’t it want to grow with people that I don’t like”

          You can dress it however you want, it’s still elitist, reactionary and exclusive.

          • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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            2 months ago

            The other night 337K people all registered to vote, simply because Taylor Swift sent one message on instagram.

            That’s the example used by OP to make their point. Just from a technical perspective, how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?

            To come back to your usual argument, do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription? Or to even support the hosting costs of the instances they would use?

            • rglullisA
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              2 months ago

              how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?

              They won’t. Not at first. First we will get maybe 50k, LW will do their thing and try to gobble up the majority of users, alien.top can also help absorb part of this crowd and I could even finally convince some other admins to set up fediverser on their instances to help with the migration.

              But the important thing is that this type of backing from the mainstream would mean free marketing.

              do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription?

              All of those people, of course not. But I expect the increased user base and media attention to bring the following:

              All of those things translate indirectly into more business opportunities, none of which need to sacrifice the ideals of the open social web.

              • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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                2 months ago

                In that scenario, let’s say for some reason Taylor Swift really wants to give Lemmy a try for whatever reason.

                Her advisors have a look around, see the userbase, and conclude it’s not worth the hassle compared to the millions of people they can reach out on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

                Taylor Swift’s team doesn’t even manage her own forum, why would they want to go through the hassle of setting up a Lemmy instance?

                The scenario described by OP is “Taylor Swift posts about the Fediverse”, but why would she care about it in the first place?

                Pinging @scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech as they are a Taylor Swift expert. Scrubbles, do you have any opinion on this discussion?

                • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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                  2 months ago

                  I’m actually flattered that I have this… reputation on Lemmy lol.

                  Personally, I don’t care if celebrities come and join, even Taylor. Honestly that’s one of the reasons I’m okay with threads starting to federate, I see celebrities joining there and then we can sub from our instances. Best of both worlds imo.

                • rglullisA
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                  2 months ago

                  It doesn’t matter if it’s a post of Taylor Swift or someone from /r/wallstreetbets convincing the mob to short RDDT and to move to Lemmy, we are talking about any random scenario that manages to get 300k people interested in Lemmy.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Right now Lemmy has something like 16K users, and a few hundred instances. Most of which are small instances hosting less than 10 users.

      What I’m suggesting is a few hundred thousand instances, with millions of users, if not billions.

      And I assume the instances would face a point where they need organization. So certain instances start hosting certain types of content.

      So if you personally don’t want to read on home and garden topics, you don’t read those instances. That’s what I’m suggesting. If you want to stick to your small corner of the fediverse, you do that.

      What you’re suggesting is that the fediverse never expand beyond the people you deem worthy of contributing content.

      I tried to give peer-tube a chance. None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube. I gave up when every single instance I found was just linux content.

      With more celebrities bring more content. With more content brings more users. With more users brings more communities, and more niches.

      I’m trying to bring down reddit, and instagram, and youtube, and twitter, and everything else thats considered social media. In its place, social media will default to the fediverse.

      You on the other hand are trying to keep the fediverse from growing.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        You’re right. I see no more intrinsic value in having 1mil users, versus 15k. And nothing you can say is likely to convince me that quantity determines or makes for a valuable platform. We’ve seen the growth mentality and resulting corporate greed destroy numerous platforms already.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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          2 months ago

          Except in this case, there can be no corporate green to destroy the fediverse. They can build and destroy their own instance, and their own communities…but the very nature of the fediverse is that it scales well, and it CAN’T be owned. So growth can only help. Temporarily it may crash the servers with more traffic than it can handle, but more instances and servers will be added, and the userbase will spread out.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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        2 months ago

        None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube.

        That’s probably more of a monetization issue than anything related to peertube. If your job is making Youtube videos, then at least some portion of your income is AdSense. Sure, it’s not what it was, but at scale it’s not nothing, and the peertube alternative is… $0.

        (Also, for the non-commercial ones or the ones that are funded outside of Youtube, maybe ask if they’ll use Peertube. I’ve had luck with a couple of people I watched being willing to upload to multiple platforms, but you don’t know if you don’t ask.)

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
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          2 months ago

          I can’t ask, because years ago I watched a video on twitter. It was funny. I tweeted “That killed me”.

          I was banned for inciting death threats by an automod.

          They’ve never heard of mastodon.

          And unless I just have no idea where it is, youtube doesn’t seem to have a direct messaging system. Everything these days is twitter.

          So I’m trying to change that.

          • I can’t ask, because years ago I watched a video on twitter. It was funny. I tweeted “That killed me”. I was banned
            youtube doesn’t seem to have a direct messaging system.

            Does this person have a patreon or something similar? Could sign up and then ask there. Or leave a youtube comment on a recent video sharing your email address.

            Heck, I might risk creating a new youtube account over VPN just to ask in a public youtube comment for peertube (so if YT bans the account for mentioning peertube, it’s no loss to me, and the creator has still gotten the message).

            They’ve never heard of mastodon.

            Makes sense if this was years ago, back when it was younger and less wide spread… I also imagine you just heard and saw this, but didn’t directly ask because, well yeah.